Tag: twitter

Users aren’t happy about the new Twitter 280 character tweets…

Twitter has already begun trialling 280-character tweets with many famous personalities and celebrities across the platform, most of which aren’t fond of the idea themselves.

Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) gave this official statement:

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu

However; doubling the character count and changing what made Twitter, Twitter, is making people unhappy to say the least.

How did people react?

Here’s how some Twitter users reacted.

WARNING – Get ready for some seriously witty comments:

Oh wow you guys it seems I’m one of the small group of users to get the 280 character Twitter expansion this is just so exciting and will let me tweet much more complex thoughts and hilarious jokes so let me start by thanking Jack Dorsey and Twitter for enabling me to better shar

So if you’re reading this, you’re interested in getting your Business on Social Media, which is good. It also means your Business should be!

It also means your Business isn’t on Social Media right now, and it should be!

However, it can be really hard to choose which profiles to put your business onto. Do you stick faithfully to one social media platform, or do you branch out into all of them?

I can offer you 4 tips to help you choose the best profile for you.

They are:

ASK YOURSELF AN IMPORTANT QUESTION

You need to look at each profile individually and think “Is this worth my time?”

You can’t be wasting your time with Instagram if you’re not a visual profile, or Twitter if you can’t deal with Customers.

Do you have the available resources, both your workforce and budget, to use that platform is also something to consider.

DON’T SIGN UP FOR EVERYTHING STRAIGHT AWAY

So you’ve got Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube to choose from – emphasis on CHOICE.

Just because you have all those platforms doesn’t mean you need to be on all of them!

Wouldn’t you rather be amazing at 1 or 2 profiles that rubbish at all of them?

PLAN PLAN PLAN!

If you’re still unsure about what profiles to go on – make a plan!

Those plans for each platform should be able to help you decide which are more achievable for you to use.

Don’t think you’re wasting your time though – those plans might come in useful later on. Once you’ve mastered a Social profile, you can start to think if you need to bring in more – and you’ll have those plans ready to use!

STICK WITH THE HUNT!

I guarantee you that you won’t be able to just choose your Social profiles straight away. You need to have a real think about your options.

You have to “hunt” your profiles essentially – stalk them and find its positives.

Remember that being on too many social media channels can affect your productivity and your results.

While chatting to some budding Business men and women in Bamboo Zone, a couple of interesting questions were raised that I felt needed some due attention:

How do you bring your Social Media profiles together?

What social profiles are best for your business?

Now these are both huge topics in themselves, and so I’ll focus on the first point this week, and go into more detail about the second in the next blog – for the sake of fairness!

So what does it mean to bring all of your Social Media profiles together? It could mean several things, like bringing your audience into one central location, or it could mean uniformity between all of your profiles. I like to believe it’s the latter, as this will help with the former!

So how do you unify your Social Media? Is it content, images, audience numbers? Let’s take a look at what you can do to bring some unity to your profiles:

Your Name

This one seems an obvious suggestion, but you would be surprised how many businesses make such a rookie mistake!

If someone is searching for you on Twitter and sees that your username is @MyBusiness, the likeliness is, is that they are now going to look for you on Facebook or Instagram with the same name.

If your username suddenly switches to @My_Business_123 on Instagram, and then @TheBusiness on Facebook, your audience is going to have a hard time keeping up with you!

If you’re struggling to get your name on one profile (say you’ve got @MyBusiness for Facebook but it’s taken elsewhere) try and stick to the original name as much as possible, or make a point of showing off your other profiles on that Facebook profile, so your customers know where to look!

Your Profile Picture/Cover Photo

This is also another obvious point (sorry), but it is vitally important that your profile pictures match across all your Social Media profiles.

I cannot stress how important this is without jumping out from this computer and shaking you until the point has sunk in.

Your profile picture is the first thing your customers are going to see, so your image not only needs to be of great quality, but also needs to be the same across all your profiles.

The same can be said for any profile with a Cover Photo. This is a great place to show off what your business does, so go for it!

Both images need to be the correct dimensions which are:

Social Media Profile

Profile Picture Size

Cover Photo Size

Facebook

170 x 170 pixels

820 x 312 pixels

Twitter

400 x 400 pixels

1500 x 500 pixels

Instagram

110 x 100 pixels

N/A

LinkedIn

400 x 400 pixels

1536 x 768 pixels

You’re welcome!

Bringing your Social Media profiles together through this imagery of your logo and message will help your customers find your profiles, say if you can’t get the same Username information for each profile!

Your Content (it’s a tricky one!)

Now the reason this is a tricky one is that this is where you need to decide what level of uniformity you want from your profiles.

I wouldn’t recommend having the same posts go out across all your Social Media profiles because that means that you’re putting out duplicate content, and your customers aren’t going to like that!

Lots of company profiles find that having an individual niche for each profile vital to their branding. They’ll use Facebook for sharing company news, blogs, updates etc, while Twitter will be used for customer service and then Instagram is used for funny content related to their field.

All these areas are individual, but come together to create a whole image of a company!

While some choose to share the same content across all their profiles, they’ll change the wording so that the content appears different for each profile – plus schedule them for different days, so it’s not the same on each profile each day.

Your Imagery

This one all depends on your content strategy. If you decide to go down the path of sharing the same content but on different days, you need to make sure the imagery is consistent.

You also need to make sure it’s the best quality images you can find. No one wants to view a blurry image of your team celebrating a new product launch. Customers like pretty images and are more likely to share them if they are.

As for the consistency element, sometimes it is good to mix it up across the profiles, but to present a unified front, it’s best to stick to the same image’s profile to profile.

How It All Comes Together

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together – don’t worry that will be my only A-Team reference…

There has been a point to all this, and why all these little points mean that your profiles are unified. When you profiles are in sync with the all right images, content and names, your business presents itself as an organised and trusted organisation, which should help bring in more customers.

It also helps when directing customers to a specific source. Do you want more traffic to your Facebook group? Give them a reason to go there, with consistency across your Social Media, and building trust with your followers.

Once that trust has been built, you can take your audience anywhere. And that trust comes from consistent and unified Social Media profiles!

Like what you’re seeing? Let us know in the comments!

Want some FREE advice from Digital Marketing experts? Join the Facebook Group everyone is dying to get into…

It’s far too easy to automatically connect your Twitter account to your Facebook profile, however, it is NOT a good idea to do this. So if you’re reading this thinking “holy crap I’m one of those people”, hopefully this blog will make you take action to disconnect.

The thing is Twitter and Facebook are completely different social platforms with different ways to engage. They both warrant a different social etiquette.

So why do people do it?

Initially it may seem like a good idea to let your friends know exactly what is going across all your social platforms. However, Twitter and Facebook engage socially in different ways. Your community, audience and friends expect different things from the social networks.

If you’re mid conversation with a community member on Twitter, and its connected to Facebook, then what relevance does this conversation have to your Facebook community? None!

In the main, Twitter is a volume based network, you can tweet many times in a day with little or no interaction. It’s because it promotes the fact you can follow hordes of different people, some you’re maybe familiar with and others who are complete strangers. Its loose permission based structure encourages this and therefore you can, in theory, connect with most people.

On the contrary Facebook, is considered a much more personal network. Its permission based, and therefore you have to have some kind of familiarity before accepting someone into your network.

Here’s the biggie, the culture of each social network are poles apart, so combining them could mean alienating your communities. After all who wants their timeline full of tweets that, quite frankly, make no sense and appear spammy.

How not to fall flat using social media!

In an ever increasing market, businesses need to stand out. Traditional marketing has still got a place, however, your potential customers and clients are buying products and services & interacting with brands in more complex ways.

The Social Media phenomenon over the last 5 year has fundamentally changed the way these potential clients buy your goods and services. Many businesses who have seen substantial growth since the recession in 2008 have continuously invested in new marketing methodologies of which social media has played a fundamental role.

Alternatively, there can be many repercussions to using Social Media as a means to communicating with your customers, below are my 10 unbelievable Social Media Fails.

1) Burger King and their “Whopper Sacrifice”:

In 2008, Burger King launched a contest in which users would remove 10 of their friends on Facebook, and for doing so, they would receive a coupon for a free whopper. However, it violated Facebook users’ expectation of privacy, and so, the campaign was shut down!

2) Pepsi’s “voodoo doll” post:

During the November of 2013, Pepsi’s Swedish branch launched an ad showing a ‘voodoo doll’ of football star Christiano Ronaldo getting its head crushed on train tracks. Fans in Portugal were not happy about this and an anti-Pepsi Facebook group was launched. In one day the group gained a following of 100K which was enough reason for Pepsi to pull the plug on the ad!

3) Build-A-Bear with a VERY insensitive post…

Build-A-Bear (along with CVS) was a target for twitter abuse after posting this 9/11 tweet. Alongside many other firms, this was clearly just a post for good publicity. However, good publicity is the complete opposite of what they received!

4) GAP being…GAP

Here’s GAP making a mildly insensitive tweet which offended East Coast victims during Hurricane Sandy! However, they later took it down and apologised.

5) Epicurious with an Epic fail

Cooking site Epicurious thought they could promote some recipes on Twitter following the events of the Boston Marathon bombing. How very wrong they were when they received all kinds of abuse after posting the following tweets!

Just one of many responses…

6) Dumb human + Computer = Bad social media!

Really? I am literally speechless…

7) This was NEVER a good idea *Facepalm*

Yes, it really is as bad as it looks. It was quickly pulled, but not after people took screenshots and it was widely circulated on social media.

Home Depot has since fired the person, and agency responsible for the outrageous tweet and offered this ‘copy & paste job’ apology to all who were offended, “We are deeply sorry for the dumb tweet and have deleted it”.

8) LG tweeting from iPhones…

In case you can’t read French…This translates to: “Our smartphones don’t bend, they are naturally curved ;).” The only problem with an otherwise (sort of) clever tweet was that it was sent via an iPhone!

9) That time HMV lost control…

And who could forget when HMV lost control of its social media team when rogue members used their account to tweet this!

10) When the Justice Department decides to weigh in on politics…

So the official excuse for this one was “A staffer in the public affairs office erroneously used the official Department of Justice Twitter handle to post a tweet that was intended for a personal account”. Hmmmm…

We would list more, but that’s definitely enough human stupidity to last us all for the next decade. The real question is, which fail topped my list of 10 unbelievable Social Media Fails? Comment below!

Connecting your business to new opportunities through Social Media

We are all very much witnessing (and living through) the rise of social. Whether you’re a business trying to increase sales, or simply someone looking to gain a larger following through social; we’re all familiar with the struggles of growing our online presence.

If you possess an existing social presence, congratulations! You’re already ahead of the game…

Too many times we hear people say they’re hesitant to make the jump to social because they’re “scared”, “not sure it will work” or have been “getting by without it”…

…what a shame!

If you came to the Chamber expo on Friday, you’d have heard Qasim mention a similar issue within businesses.

Initially, we weren’t planning to release this as a blog. However, as my A-level Economics teacher used to frequently proclaim, “shift happens”.

So now this vital knowledge accessible to all and thus, here’s our blog on connecting your business to new opportunities through Social Media!

Start with the end in mind

Where do you see yourself in 1 year? 2 years? 5 years?

Social media is a long term game, you can’t expect immediate results, it just doesn’t work like that.

That’s like starting a new business and expecting to make massive profits within months, if anything you’ll barely be breaking even (but more than likely you’ll be making a loss).

It’s the perseverance and blood, sweat and tears that get you through this initial stage of barely breaking even and the same can be said for social media.

What’s your end goal?

Thousands of followers?

High engagement

Building a community for your audience?

Reaching out to influencers and working with other brands?

If you figure out the end game, the rest of the formula can be reverse engineered, making it easier to work towards your targets.

Analyse the platforms

Businesses – avoid being over eager, spreading your social presence too thin then finding yourself overwhelmed with it all.

If your diary always packed, stick to one platform, get good at it then branch out.

For those with a bit more time, we recommend researching which social media platforms would work best for you.

This depends on a few factors which are:

Time you have to spend on each platform

The industry your business is in

Where your target market is

Social Listening

As humans, we don’t listen enough. We try and shove our brand in everyone’s face and then realise that’s not what people want from us AT ALL.

Here are a few great things to consider:

Where are your customers?

What are your competitors doing?

What aren’t your competitors doing?

Keep researching because then you have a guideline to follow when posting, reaching out to people or following others!

Start Curating

Now that you have more of an idea about what your audience wants, the influencers in your network, the types of content that work; you can start curating.

As mentioned above, try experimenting with methods that your competitors aren’t using, because then that content is unique to you.

In our own case, we started doing #DigitalNuggets because we recognised the lack of digital knowledge that agencies were providing to businesses.

Consistency

This is where brands get it completely wrong. Businesses don’t see immediate results and this makes them think social media is a waste of time.

Hang in there, it’s a LONG TERM plan.

Keep going, stay consistent and you WILL see results…

Timing

Timing is key – that’s a simple fact of life.

No one is in the market to buy your product immediately, which is why most businesses need to change up their sales oriented social media pages.

Give time to nurture relationships with people and, when the timing is right, it’s okay to slip in a cheeky “sales-y” post.

Remember – if someone isn’t in the market for your product/service, keep the relationship going as they may be able to refer someone to you!

Treat potential customers and non-customers the same.

Values

What your business stands for needs to be as obvious as the products you’re selling or the service you provide.

People with the same ideologies, values and beliefs tend to be more open to connecting with you.

It’s important to note that topics like politics, religion and general controversial topics should be avoided (but not always). I mean we like to make fun of Donald Trump from time to time because who doesn’t?

Lastly, keep it human. Business is now H2H (human to human) and people forget that their customer is just another human like you and I.

Measurement and Testing

Now’s the time to repeat the cycle. Go back and measure your campaigns!

There are a few things to consider with this:

Have certain types of content worked better than others?

Are there times where I get more engagement?

How successful have my overall campaigns been?

When you ask these necessary questions, you can figure out what to do next when aiming to achieve your goals!

Today’s article was a bit lengthy, but if you’re reading this then congratulations – your campaigns will soon be sprinkled with magic (provided you’re following the advice enclosed)!

Social Media etiquette guide for businesses:

Do you ever observe poor social media marketing and wonder “what was that person thinking”?! Well, being a social media marketer that occurrence happens frequently in my life (yes I like to go wild on Fridays).

My amigos, it’s your lucky day. Gone are the days of poor standards when it comes to social media because now, whenever you’re unsure, you can refer back to this amazing guide.

So let’s get straight to the social media etiquette guide for businesses:

1) Cut out the spam:

People hate, and I mean REALLY hate, to be spammed. Just think about how many times you’ve been spammed yourself and consider whether you found those situations to be “pleasant” or not.

Well, some of the ways you can cut out spam are:

Don’t over post (posting too frequently).

Stop with the automatic follow messages on Twitter, PLEASE!

If you don’t know someone, don’t tag them in something

Every follower/like you acquire is another opportunity, please avoid driving them to insanity with spam…

2) Stop posting the same types of content:

With all of the tools at your disposal, why settle for posting the same type of content over and over again?

Too many times I’ve seen businesses use the same type of imagery with slightly different text and images…

If you’re stuck for ideas, here are a few to spark your inspiration:

Share article links

Images

Videos

GIFs

Infographics

Quotes

Live videos (Periscope, Facebook Live)

Use a mix of the above, see what works and stop using stuff that doesn’t work…simples.

3) Aim to create value and not sales:

This one depends on your objectives for social media. From what I do know though, people don’t like being sold to, period.

Occasional sales oriented posts are acceptable, but spamming followers with these types of posts is not good.

Please keep promotional posts to a minimum (2 times a week MAX).

4) Be friendly:

To be honest, there’s nothing funnier than people getting mad on social media. When it happens I’m usually there with my popcorn in hand, waiting for the “offensive” comments to start rolling.

BUT – if you indulge in such negativity, it will make your brand seem more unapproachable, grumpy, miserable and just about everything else that can make you look terrible.

Next time someone annoys you on social media, just remember to “kill them with kindness”.

5) Don’t get too controversial:

Occasionally weighing in on controversial topics is actually a good thing (provided your views aren’t radical). It creates opportunity to attain some quality engagement for a little amount of effort.

Sometimes businesses go too far though…take the following example:

6) Know your bl**dy audience:

Last but not least on our social media etiquette guide for businesses, KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!

If your audience is 50+, you’re not going to be spending your time creating “dank memes” because your audience won’t relate or engage.

This information is easily accessible within your social media platform’s analytics, if you want a little more detail on Facebook’s insights click here.

Hootsuite published a “think before you post” image which can be seen below, It’s a great rough guide to follow.

I know you’re having fun but, unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. Hope you enjoyed my Social Media etiquette guide for businesses. Don’t fret, I’ll be back next week with more great content. See you all in a week folks!

Twitter character count updated and you may not have even noticed…

The 21st of March 2006 marks a historical day for all social media experts, digital marketers and general social media enthusiasts alike.

If you guessed that this significant day marked the birthday of social media giant Twitter, congratulations, because we had to Google that.

So, you’re here and ready to learn about what those dastardly people at Twitter have been up to in the background.

No need to worry, this update is a lot less devious than those we have experienced in the past. In fact, it’s the complete opposite (yes that’s right, you’re going to love it)!

If we’re being honest, not everyone is keen on the character limit Twitter enforces and that’s fair…I mean Donald Trump is STILL a “thing” regardless of his stupidity which goes to show just how unfair these things are.

Anyway, you can now say goodbye to heavily condensed down status updates and hello to more freedom!

Twitter is not regarding multimedia as the usual 23 characters anymore thanks to the Twitter character count update!

Actually, it’s not JUST multimedia that will be affected by a non-existent character count. The full list is as follows:

Photos

Videos

GIFs

Twitter Polls

Quote Tweets

No need to pinch yourself, you did read that correctly. What seemed like an annoyance for many is now a thing of the past.

This video that Twitter created will help you better understand the update:

A US organisation is claiming that it relies solely on SEO services to bring in business, removing the need for print marketing in the process. And they claim they have never performed better.

A US organisation is claiming that it relies solely on SEO services to bring in business, removing the need for print marketing in the process. And they claim they have never performed better.

Executive Limousine’s chief executive, Douglas Schwartz, was recently featured in the New York Times when he made the decision to pledge all of his company’s advertising budget onto pay per click and SEO services.

The paper reports that “As a result, 85 percent of Executive Limousine’s business comes from the internet.”

He also uses social media sites, like facebook and Twitter, to place localised PPC adverts. He claims to have spent thousands on his SEO crusade thus far, however it seems to be paying off for him.